Am I the only one whose first thought on the news of this Titanic submersible going missing, was that we need Thunderbird 4……..
If Gerry Anderson were still alive, I’m sure it would have been all sorted by now.
Also, how come there is a massive rescue operation launched for 5 rich guys in a sub, yet when a migrant boat goes down in the Mediterranean with 80 or so lives lost…….
I agree with your sentiments regarding if a migrant boat goes down, I have thought this myself over the past days.
However I do not think it is time to joke re: Thunderbirds about the terrible situation these men have found themselves in.
Whilst it’s clearly a horrible situation, it’s one they’ve put themselves in. They were all aware of the risks before they got in. I would put it in the same category as doing a parachute jump and the parachute not opening.
I would neither joke about anyone`s parachute not opening. I find someone who can joke about situations such as these are in need of help.
Sorry, I wasn’t suggesting you would. I was merely suggesting that they had put themselves in the position they’re in rather than found themselves in that position.
It looks highly likely that 5 people will die this morning after several days slowly running out of air in a tiny metal vessel deep, deep in the ocean. They are dying right now and will know it. I don’t think it’s the right time to ponder the relative reactions to the plight of others.
RNLI went out about 300 times last year to rescue migrant boats in the Channel. Incredibly impressive, given many of them are volunteers.
Agree that we should respect the dignity of all human life. Also agree with those above that the Thunderbirds gag appears to run counter to that logic.
Hope they’re able to find and rescue the poor souls in that submarine. Awful.
And Twitter is heaving with twats who say we should stop donating to RNLI because they’re running a taxi service [sic] for illegals [sic]. Seems to have no effect except to encourage donations, fortunately.
Says it all about Twitter that it’s a place where we can’t even agree that lifeboats are a good thing. Or, I’m sure, that people drowning in a submarine is tragic. Grim.
I’ve never joined Twitter. The experiences and reportage on this site are just one of the reasons why I never will. Does it have any redeeming features, sufficient to counterbalance the negatives?
It can often be very funny, it’s frequently surprisingly supportive, and you can get a daily dose of cute animal videos (or whatever other fluff takes the edge off for you). There is very little gatekeeping though, and it can be difficult to learn that you should block and move on when something provokes you rather than allowing yourself to be drawn in.
I just posted a comment along these lines but it’s disappeared. The good far outweighs the bad AFAIC.
I think it can be very useful for info and news, but I find the vast majority of threads very, very quickly descend into childish ad-hominem insults, on both sides of any “discussion”. The limitation placed on the number of words discourages politeness and the people who use it sadly get used to that. My personal rule is “look, but never join in”.
There are loads of excellent feed on Twitter – superb photographic archive material, and music links that I would never have found anywhere else spring to mind- but the algorithm is geared towards polarisation & therefore rewards extreme opinions that generate division.
I found this led to cranks & nutjobs ‘crashing’ into otherwise fairly balanced threads, & stinking up the place a bit like a handful of aggressive gatecrashers barging into a house party.
I had a guts full ( not to mention the current arsehole proprietor) so I bailed earlier in the year & haven’t regretted it for a moment.
@fitterstoke
Joined for about two minutes when I self-published and needed to publicize a book I wrote a few years back. Don’t think I lasted more than five minutes.
The perfect example of what Wyndham Lewis called a “Moronic Inferno”
You’re entitled to your opinion of course, but I can only repeat that my experience is way more positive than that. Threads that are likely to descend into a moronic inferno are easily avoided (rather like here in that respect), and if twat posts turn up on my timeline (usually because someone I follow has engaged) they are easily blocked. I follow plenty of amusing and informative posters of all sorts (not least @archie-valparaiso, occasionally of this parish), and the amusement and information I derive from them far outweighs the minuses.
My main beef is the ads, which claim to be targeted but hardly ever are. Why Twitter thinks I’m interested in bitcoin or management seminars I have no idea, but all you have to do is click the not interested button.
If you know the Twitter handle of people you want to follow, you can view their recent timeline via the website. I check Minibreakfast of this parish when I’m bored at work (i.e. several times a day). For example:
Tweets by VinylCarBooty
This is the sort of life-affirming stuff she posts.
I quit Twitter after Musk took control and haven’t regretted it. My work requires that I occasionally scan it under a company account and I think that on balance the bad now outweighs the good. And it’s incidents like this terrible lost submersible event that seem to bring out the worst in anonymous Twitter.
Fair enough, but you do seem to be underestimating how easy it is to ignore anonymous Twitter.
My main gripe with Twitter (and a gripe I ignore) is that most of the time I am in a bubble populated with people I largely agree with, whether that be on Brexit or Boris or Billy Bragg.
Well that’s easily fixed, Lodes. Why, over lunch I found myself right out of my bubble, sparring with a bunch of loons* who are convinced the Oxford comma is your only man, punctuation-wise.
*Americans.
Oddly, in a conversation with American colleagues today, I found I was the only editor in my company to use Oxford commas, much to their derision.
Oh and I agree with you re Twitter. I use it sparingly, when I have a new episode of albumtoalbum to punt, otherwise it’s pretty depressing.
If agree, if I wasn’t constantly told that twitter was a horrible place, I would never know. I obviously only follow the right people!
But do you use Twitter to follow political interests at all? If so, I find the choice is either to keep strictly within in a small echo chamber of like-minded people who agree with and reinforce your every opinion -which I find dull- or else see numerous discussions that start off interesting before quickly descending into moronic childishness and exchange of insults.
I guess if I didn’t use Twitter to follow politics and the news I wouldn’t find it so overwhelmingly unpleasant.
I get a lot of intelligence (I use the word advisedly) from political Twitter, but just as often it’s the like-minded people who quickly descend into moronic childishness.
Oh, certainly. I’ll often be reading a discussion, thinking “I totally agree with this person”s excellent point” and then all of a sudden he/she starts with the stupid name-calling.
That must be it. I generally follow culture based accounts. I do see political retweets of course but never the full blown discussion.
Apologies if any offensive taken at my Thunderbirds “gag” – I certainly didn’t mean it as a joke or was making light of an undeniably tragic situation, but maybe the timing was inappropriate.
I do stand by my comment comparing to the Greek migrant boat though.
No disrespect to the families of the five people in the submersible who will almost certainly not come out of this alive, but Peter Brookes’ cartoon in this morning’s Times perfectly sums up just how skewed our priorities have become.
Without musing on attempted rescue cost and the relative value of human life this would be a totally hellish situation to find oneself in. Assuming they won’t get out of this alive I hope they had quick, relatively painless deaths
I think that’s what’s really captured the world’s attention – the small number of people and their background is irrelevant, it’s the sheer “worst nightmare” scenario of being trapped in a confined space and slowly running out of oxygen.
Plus being further victims of the Titanic indirectly
Is it anywhere near the Bermuda triangle?
There was someone on a bit earlier who said the low temperatures would get to them before the lack of oxygen and said that freezing to death was a relatively painless way to die. It’s all very grim.
The claustrophobia would get me long before either of those. It must be like having an MRI without the holes at both ends.
I might be misremembering, but wasn’t there a Russian sub which sank a few years ago with the crew trapped inside? US forces were nearby and could have rescued them, but the Kremlin didn’t want their help for ‘strategic’ reasons.
Surely lives are worth more than ‘national defence’? Mind you, I am a hippy. Man.
The Kursk. Must be 20 years ago now.
Personally think we’d be seeing a similar fuss no matter who was in that sub, partly because (until maybe today) there was a sense they could still be saved. Partly because the unusual situation, drama and race against time makes it a perfect news story.
We saw the same for Thai teenagers trapped in a cave, and for Chilean miners. I don’t honestly believe the world particularly gives a shit about Chilean miners most of the time, but they were still on the front page for a fortnight and there was an international effort to rescue them. And rightly so.
That’s it. 23 years ago, apparently. In AW terms, 20 years ago = last week.
Grim though it is, I know the diver who was first into the Kursk when “they” got there, chap called Tony Scott, a lovely man. He doesn’t talk about it much, though.
It’s an horrific situation, no doubt.
These men are in an everyone’s worst nightmare situation. It doesn’t matter whether they’re billionaires or whether they haven’t got a pot to piss in at this juncture.
They literally only have (had) a pot to piss in as the toilet facilities are described as “basic”
True. Someone on that there Twitter the other day posted a news story about the Greek tragedy – no, really – claiming the media hadn’t covered it.
Was it ever explained how Thunderbird 2 recovered the pod? Let alone how Gordon got TB4 back into it….let alone how he managed the shock when the pod hit the water….
I have a memory which is probably real of TB4 reversing back up into the pod using the same exit ramp. I think they showed TB2 hovering overhead but skipped past the awkward reattaching of the pod problem.
The dead drop was quite something. I expect Gordon was grateful he was a marionette..
What was obviously glossed over was the horrendous odour of crusty gym socks escaping the airlock of Thunderbird 5 when it was resupplied/remanned.
Poor old John, he seems to have been a pariah within the Tracy family ( maybe he had BO). What else was he supposed to do, alone in space with access to the 60s equivalent of the ‘internet’? Can’t have been good for his eyesight.
The TB tech that always had me flummoxed was the widget they had in TB1 and TB2 that raised the alarm if anyone pointed a camera at them. Here we are in the 21st Century and no-one’s invented it yet? There’s a fortune to be made right there.
Looks simple enough to fit yourself..
It seems the company hired a submarine safety expert, who was sacked after submitting his report.
One of the people on board the sub at the moment was the man who sacked him.
Also on board a 19 yr old from Glasgow 🙁
And his father. Utterly unimaginable.
Whatever mistakes these people made, they surely don’t deserve this.
Debris has been found, if it is from the craft then probably the result of an “instantaneous implosion”, meaning that they would, I assume, have had a quick death which in the situation is probably a blessing.
Multiple lawsuits ahoy.
It will be a special lawyer that gets past that waiver.
The firing of the engineer who warned about safety will be the way in.
True enough. That’s if the company isn’t wound up before it gets that far. I suspect there is no insurance cover of any substance.
The very concept of what they were doing seems reckless. Not sure where a litigant would go from there.
Now confirmed as being from the craft.
All 5 declared dead
Incredibly ironic that it was for a viewing of the Titanic.
Useful context here:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-titanic-sub-was-made-cheapand-that-may-have-doomed-it?ref=home?ref=home
Basically, the thing was a piece of cheaply-built junk without basic safety features (such as a location beacon). Yes, a horrible way to die, but whether the passengers were victims of tragedy (didn’t “deserve” this fate) is a little nuanced, isn’t it? They coughed up a million dollars between them for what was basically a thrill ride. There was no scientific or educational purpose to the trip, and it was made in spite of a risk which could (and did) extend to rescue workers. The passengers did nothing morally wrong, but they were reckless and put themselves in harm’s way for no good reason. It’s basically like a hugely expensive bungee jump where the rope (seen to be fraying) broke. Thoughts and prayers?
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m currently doing 180 m.p.h. down the M40 in a dustbin, steered using a PS4 controller, with a couple of headtorches for illumination. Nothing to worry abo
You probably shouldn’t be using your phone though.
The Daily Mail and The Express (no surprise) both have cover headlines claiming the Titanic has claimed five more lives. What a ridiculous way of framing it. That would be like a group of archaeologists falling in a civil war mass grave, dying, and the Mail blaming it on Oliver Cromwell’s army.
See also: the curse of disturbed Egyptian Tombs.
Howard Carter opened the Tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, and he died (from cancer, age 64) a mere 17 years later.
@TypeF
Equally risible are the columnists and below-the-fold keyboard warriors hailing the poor fuckers who lost their lives as being “intrepid explorers” who were somehow adding to the sum total of human knowledge
Carbon fibre apparently which is why the other bloke objected and was sacked. Cant be stress tested – when it shows it blows. Plus there was another material titanium possibly so uneven stress capacity and vulnerabilities where they connect. Well that is what I read anyway.
There were a couple of experts as well as the fuckwit who owned the outfit and the rich bloke and his son.
Imploded – so they got crushed ? 😳
That’s a yes: pressure increases linearly with depth. If the implosion occurred at 3500 metres depth, pressure would be in the region of 350 atmospheres. Catastrophic failure would result in instant death by crushing for the occupants, I would think.
And now Boris has hailed the five victims as being never say die British explorers who were pushing the frontiers of knowledge, etc, in his column in the Daily Fail.
Don’t know how he’ll manage to keep peddling this type of claptrap if they ban AI
Oliver’s army is here to stay? Did Elvis Costello predict this tragedy? EXCLUSIVE!
I read today that the US Navy detected this implosion within an hour of losing contact with the submersible. If that’s the case, how come there was a massive search and rescue operation ?
They said that the sound was ‘not definitive’ which would explain why they carried on.
This.
They heard ‘A’ noise. Without knowing definitely what it was, it would have been a callous decision to call things off.
Anyone fancy supporting a crowd-funding page to buy tickets for the following individuals on the next submersible trip?
Mr. V Putin. (Address unknown)
Mr. X Jingping. (Beijing, China)
Mr. D. Trump. (Florida, USA)
Mr. B. Johnson. (London, England)
Mr. R Erdogan. (Istanbul, Turkey)
Feel free to nominate other candidates as necessary
Kate Bush
Jarvis Cocker
Joolz Holland
Paul McCartney
Elvis Costello
Nick Lowe
Him out of Depeche Mode (either)
The Onion today: “Critics say submersible should’ve been tested with poorer passengers first”
That is very acerbic of them.
@leedsboy
Careful with the criticism, L
The people who put together The Onion are apparently notoriously thin-skinned
…but multi-layered…
applause
There’s not a dry eye in the house
I’m worried I’m going to be in a pickle.
Right. That’s chalotte.
You, sir, are a rap scallion.
Thank you for ignoring the spelling mistake, which I worried might compromise the integrity of the joke. May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on ramping up the humour quotient?